Blog Post #1

Prompt: Based on your reading, would you consider your current instruction style more behavioralist, cognitivist, constructivist or connectivist? Elaborate with your specific mindset and examples.

I would describe my current instructional style as cognitivist, shaped by my educational background and by experiences observing what has and has not worked for me as a learner. I returned to education later in life to complete my GED and eventually pursue my degree, and early on I struggled significantly with courses that relied heavily on passive content transmission. From my perspective, this approach felt less like learning and more like sitting in a long meeting and taking notes for someone else.

My outlook shifted after meeting a professor who taught in what I now know is a cognitivist manner. Each class focused on establishing core fundamentals and then immediately applying them to meaningful problems. She encouraged students to explore how concepts could be used, reflect on their understanding, and describe connections between ideas. This process of building and refining ideas created a strong foundation for me. This experience influenced my own instructional mindset. With the widespread availability of online resources and Large Language Models, information has become highly accessible. In this context, I believe the instructor’s value lies less in delivering information and more in building that information and guiding understanding to established models.

I aim to apply this in my tutoring and “teaching” , particularly within my club activities. For example, when teaching a subsystem team about lift generation in an underwater glider, I began by assessing the group’s existing foundational knowledge. While participants understood individual physics concepts, they struggled to see how these ideas interacted as a system. To address this we started talking about other systems which interacted similarly like a balloon and used that to draw parallels to the current system Ie: Air is very similar to a fluid. This allowed the learners to draw from a core foundation of knowledge and analyze a new situation in a more familiar context. I found that when we discussed this topic during a meeting later the learners were much more confident in their answers and were able to reason about things not covered using the same approach.